Open Asset Import Library 3.1 released with FBX 2013+ support

Alexander Gessler et al. released an update of the Open Asset Import Library that provides tools to convert 3D content between file formats.

Major changes in this version boiled down to newly added support for:

FBX 2013 and newer revisions of the file format, both binary and ASCII;

OGRE binary mesh format;

newer Blender file format;

arbitrary metadata, usually applicable for FBX and DAE files.

The work by Alexander on FBX support was part of his Google Summer of Code project for Blender. His code was never merged into upstream Blender, but served as a foundation for a native importer added in Blender 2.69.

Additionally, meshes can now have names which is supported by major importers, and the OBJ exporter produces smaller files now. Also, IFC geometry generation from parametric scene description has been improved, and support for M3 files has been removed.

While working on the new features, the team squashed hundreds of bugs and made CMake the primary build system.

On top of that, Alexander released open3mod, a Windows-only viewer/converter for 3D content supported by the library. The new app is intended to replace the old viewer, featuring an improved user interface.

Regarding future plans, Alexander says:

For 4.0 we plan to cleanup the code base and the documentation, and to get rid of non-maintained ports. We are also going to deprecate a few APIs that have never been useful or required internal hacks to make them possible. Basically, 4.0 will be a cleaner version of 3.1.

You can download source code and binaries for Windows from SourceForge.